by Audrey Faye
I felt my eyebrows fly up into my hairline. “You cook? And you talked to Tee?” Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who conducted my research through unorthodox channels.
“A lovely young lady.” My host turned abruptly left. “Here, we can sneak out this way and avoid most of the lines.”
Those lines were the dreaded torture otherwise known as interplanetary customs. Even in tiny spaceports, they were living hell. “Don’t we have to clear the wardens first?”
She grinned. “You’re awfully law abiding for a Singer.”
I’d heard tales about Tameka’s generation of Fixers. “You guys messed it up for the rest of us—there are a lot more rules now.”
That seemed to amuse her more than anything I’d said so far. “We didn’t have Yesenia regularly kicking our balls in. I hear she rides you guys pretty hard.”
I knew better than to complain about the boss. “She runs a tight ship, but she’s always been fair.”
My host nodded, and I imagined I saw approval in her eyes. “I’ve heard that, too.”
“Get a lot of Fixer traffic way out here?” She seemed awfully knowledgeable about how to feed, soothe, and kidnap us.
Tameka ducked through the silky folds of an egress tunnel and beckoned me to follow. “More than you might think.”
That wasn’t something my mission briefing had noted. “Recent activity?”
She snorted. “You know the rules, Singer. I feed you, give you a basic orientation so you don’t commit any big cultural fuck-ups during your stay here, and then I stand back and let you gather your own impressions.”
She was impossible not to like. “You’re awfully law abiding for a retired old fart.”
Her laugh carried all the way to the end of the tunnel and bounced back at us. “Yesenia didn’t send me a tame one this time.” She looked up at me as she put her hand on the egress door. “Good. You’ll need those sharp edges, I think.”
That didn’t bode well.
Then the door opened and I stopped worrying about what might happen tomorrow. A vista of undulating greens and yellows stretched as far as the eye could see. Notes rose in my throat, worshipful and unbidden.
Tameka was watching me again with those keen eyes. “This view’s better than the one out the front doors of the space terminal.”
It was staggering. “I’ve never seen anything like it—are those your grasslands?”
“The very edges of them.”
The landscape moved like an ocean in slow motion, twisting in a mesmerizing dance as winds caressed grasses and the grasses rose up to meet them. I wanted to touch. Heck, I wanted to run into the vast expanse and play a cosmic game of hide-and-seek with the wind.
Tameka smiled, and I felt like I’d passed some kind of important test. “Now you know why a retired old fart like me lives here.” She lifted her hand and waved at a hovering bubblepod. “Here’s our ride.”
I was pretty sure my ride was just getting started. “You have enough solar to power private vehicles?” By my standards, that made Bromelain III a pretty rich planet.
“Lots of sun here. And wind.” Tameka ran her palm over the lock and clambered inside a lot more spryly than I managed after four days of tin canning. “And my little piece of the planet has a lovely underground spring, so we’ve got some micro-hydro hooked up too—that’s how we power Nijinsky here.”
I blinked. “Your b-pod has a name?”
“Certainly.”
Curiosity gets me, every damn last time. “And who or what was Nijinsky?”
“The greatest dancer who ever lived. He loved to defy gravity.” Tameka waved her hand at the dashboard. “Do you trust an old fart to drive, or would you rather I went on auto?”
I would far rather be flown by an old woman than by a pseudo-sentient glass bubble. “I’m fine with manual—I grew up on a mining asteroid.”
“Ah.”
A whole lot of understanding in one syllable—too much, maybe. “Ever been on a digger rock?”
“A few times.” She adjusted settings on the dash and lifted Nijinsky off the ground smoothly. “It struck me as a hard life with a lot of knocks and not enough joy.”
There had been some. I stared out at the vista below, trying not to think too much about a past where I’d never quite known whether I was running from or toward, and let the grasses do their hypnotic work on my tired eyes.
I woke up when Tameka banked hard right and sent my head to wobbling. The view hadn’t changed much, but I had no idea how long I’d been out. “Sorry—I don’t usually fall asleep on the job.”
“You wouldn’t be the first visitor the grasses have put to sleep.”
“I hope most of them aren’t driving.”
She chuckled, and then banked again, less steeply this time, and glanced over at me curiously. “How’d KarmaCorp find you?”
Apparently a nap hadn’t put the personal conversation to rest. “Accident. A small trader ship was out on patrol, had a Singer on board. They got lost and ran into the side of the rock I lived on.”
Tameka winced, as did pretty much everyone who heard that chunk of my history. “I assume the Singer survived.”
For a while. Not everyone else had been so lucky. “My dad and I were out running a survey and picked up the SOS call. When we got there, the Singer was trying to hold the trader vessel together long enough to get everyone out.” The memory of her single pure, clear note ringing out into the galaxy still brought me to the edge of tears.
“Amelie Descol,” said Tameka, voice reverent and sad. “I heard the story. I didn’t know she’d also found a trainee.”
Sending that message to KarmaCorp had been her last act before she died. They’d come for me a couple of months later, one ratty brat from a mining rock who had no idea why she heard music inside her head—or why she’d needed, every night for two months, to walk out under the dark sky and sing Amelie’s note up to the stars. “Someone would have found me eventually.” KarmaCorp’s Seekers rarely missed.
“Likely.” Her eyes scanned the horizon. “Were you happy to be found?”
“No.” I wasn’t sure why I’d answered—this had somehow become an uncomfortably deep foray into the personal. I could still feel the wordless fury of the fiery demon child who had discovered that her new destiny had even less flexibility than her first—and far fewer dark tunnels to hide in.
“You seem to have adjusted.”
There was a clear note of sympathy in her voice, and I didn’t want it. “Not much future on a mining rock.” I’d learned to deal with the change from one kind of flotsam to another. And eventually, I’d found my dark tunnels, my little tastes of freedom. “It worked out okay. Things like your grasslands are a pretty nice payoff.”
“Indeed.”
It felt like something important had just happened, but I had no idea what, and I was done falling asleep on the job. “You have local briefing notes for me?”
“Something like that.” My host cleared her throat and sipped from a water pack. “The short version of culture, whatever that may be, here on Bromelain III. Don’t stand on protocol overmuch, don’t assume we’re dumb farmers, and don’t mess with anyone’s water supplies. Manage all that, and you’ll be fine.”
That was as short a list as I’d ever gotten. “Sounds like a pretty tolerant place.”
“People are spread out here. We keep to ourselves unless we choose company. It helps to keep the peace.”
That was going to throw a few wrinkles in my mission. I needed to observe my targets, and that was a lot easier to do in a crowd. “Do you know why I’m here?”
She snorted. “Half the planet knows why you’re here. Emelio Lovatt sent for you. That kind of stuff doesn’t stay quiet.”
I cursed Yesenia inventively in my head—her briefing had lacked that rather salient detail. “Why the heck would an Inheritor do that?” Most ruling families were very loath to give up any of their power, especially to the KarmaCorp behemoth. And no one got
to send for a Fixer, not even planetary royalty. Perhaps especially planetary royalty. We weren’t at the beck and call of people with power—we helped them when we chose.
Apparently, we had chosen.
Tameka dropped altitude and smiled mysteriously. “The Lovatts are not your typical Inheritors.”
I was getting that much loud and clear. “Care to fill me in any more than that?” Generally Fixers were left to do their own investigating, and I preferred it that way, but it was pretty clear that Tameka wasn’t our typical local contact.
“I think I’ll leave it at that.” She swung the b-pod out in a low curve, bringing us down tight over the sweeping grasslands. “We’re almost at my place—you’ll be staying with me tonight, and then the Lovatts are expecting you tomorrow. Their accommodations will be far plusher than mine.”
I stared at her, certain I’d developed a sudden and catastrophic hearing problem. “Excuse me?”
Tameka chuckled. “Yesenia held her cards close to her chest on this one, did she?”
“That can’t work.” Fixers worked from the sidelines. Sometimes I went in incognito, sometimes just with a very low profile—but always, the goal was to move freely in the shadows. Staying at a freaking Inheritor’s residence was anything but low profile, especially if they were the ones who had called me in.
“It will let you observe Devan Lovatt closely,” said my host wryly.
It was going to put me in a bloody fishbowl. “And I suppose Janelle Brooker lives next door and comes over every night for dinner.”
“Well, not every night.” Tameka looked over at me, eyes glinting merrily. “And neighbors here live a little farther apart than you might be used to.” She pointed a finger out my side of the bubble. “That’s my shack right there. The nearest folks would be the Rideaus, and they live over that ridge.”
I wasn’t following her finger anymore. I was looking at the tiny, gorgeously angular building of sim-wood and glass dropped in the middle of grassland stretching as far as the eye could see. “That’s yours?”
I could almost feel my host’s hum of warm pleasure. “It is. It doesn’t suit most.”
It was my idea of paradise—full of attitude, bathed in sunshine, and really well hidden. “I don’t suppose we can tell the Lovatts that I fell out the back of the cubesat and will be arriving next week instead?”
“The Inheritor will already know of your arrival.” Tameka descended sharply toward her enchanting home in the middle of the high grass. “But you’d be welcome to stay at the end of your assignment, Singer. I do believe I’ve taken a liking to you.”
I’d already figured that out—her hands were moving in the same dance Iggy’s did when she greeted a friend. But it was good to hear the words anyhow. Fixers learned to take pleasurable moments when they could.
Especially at the beginning of assignments that reeked of impending disaster.
8
I slid out the door of Tameka’s tiny cabin, even in my exhaustion unable to resist the call of the glories overhead. All the glass had made it impossible to miss the blues and greens dancing cold fire across the night sky, casting weird and beautiful shadows onto the rippling gray grasslands below.
Sky magic, my father’s people called it. A Dancer’s heart would flourish here.
I looked around for my host, not wanting to intrude on her privacy. No one built a shack in the middle of nowhere unless they liked a whole lot of time to themselves.
“Behind you,” she said, coming around the north corner of her home. “View’s better from the other side, and I’ve got a couple bottles of cider chilling, if you like. Real stuff—I’ve got a friend who retired to Gaia V and sings to his apple orchards all day long. His first cider tasted like rocket fuel, but these last bottles are fairly tolerable.”
I smiled—I’d been to Gaia V. Elegant, miniscule farms piled one on top of the other. They provided luxury food items to half the quadrant. The cider would be seriously prime. “You’d be claustrophobic there.”
She looked out at her grasslands and laughed. “I would indeed.”
I followed her around a corner, still not sure how angles and glass felt so homey. It was a far cry from the underground oval pods of my home asteroid.
The far side of Tameka’s house had a small deck and two lounging chairs turned to face some hills in the distant north. The planet’s twin moons hung low on the horizon, picking up blue and green shadows from the sky auroras.
I slung my butt in a chair, not at all sure I wanted to be sitting yet. It felt good enough, so I stayed.
Tameka took a seat beside me and fished around in a bucket at the side of her chair. “So what kind of name is Lakisha Drinkwater?”
Apparently, the strange personal interrogation wasn’t over yet, but I was in a good enough mood to answer. “It’s the kind of name you get when your mom’s got Jamaican blood and your dad’s sixth-generation space Cheyenne.”
Her cider bottle stopped halfway to anywhere useful. “You haven’t exactly got the coloring for that mix of bloodlines.”
That was putting it politely. I was pale blonde Scandinavian, through and through. But whoever might have given birth to me, it was a couple of miners who had brought me to the only home my child self remembered. “My adoptive parents found me in an evac pod on the side of a crater.” With a woman dead in the junker ship wreckage beside me, one of the unregistereds that collected space scrap to sell for barely enough to fuel their vessels. Ship systems, barely functional even before the crash, had routed all remaining oxygen to the evac pod and the week-old baby inside it. The Federation had been duly informed, but there were no living relatives, no one to claim me. It was a common enough story in the farther reaches of the galaxy. So I’d gone from space-junker brat to mining-rock brat.
“I’m sorry,” said Tameka quietly. “It was well done of them to take you in.”
I shrugged. “They were miners, and another pair of hands was always useful.” I said it without rancor—they’d been decent enough parents, they just hadn’t had any idea what to do with their blonde wild child.
She inclined her head in the dark. “Destiny has tossed you around some.”
It had—and the two most pivotal events in my life had come when someone had crashed a tin can into a rock. I was damn glad my butt was no longer sitting in one. “I grow where I’m planted.” Or I’d learned to, anyhow. With a lot of very patient help.
“Good.” Tameka was back to drinking her cider. “We respect hard-won roots out here.”
The colony planets usually did. It hadn’t been any different back on the mining asteroid—we’d assumed that anyone who’d grown up on one of the pampered inner planets was soft. I’d met enough of those people since to have changed my impressions somewhat, but they definitely hardened up a little differently.
The show in the sky was getting more serene, but no less enthralling. “Does it do this often?”
“An hour or two most nights.”
Score one for the boondocks. A quick yellow light flashed to the far left of my view. “Meteorite?”
“Nope. Visitor.” My host squinted at the night sky. “Coming from the direction of the Lovatts’.”
She didn’t sound surprised. “Do they usually just hop on over for a visit?”
“Often enough.” She smiled. “The Inheritor appreciates a good cider.”
I tried to imagine a ruler of one of the inner planets dropping by for a bottle of homebrew—or Yesenia, for that matter. They’d likely give someone heart failure.
“I don’t think this is Emelio, however.” Tameka was still watching the light trail approaching from the west. “He drives like a man with a lot of responsibility. This must be Evgenia.”
The GooglePlex had known very little other than that she existed. “Got a quick download on her?”
The retired Fixer chuckled. “I’ve been here going on twenty-five years now, and I don’t even begin to pretend I’ve got Evgenia figured out. She’s part f
armer’s daughter, part voodoo priestess, part Scottish laird.”
I wasn’t even sure what all those things were. “Sounds complicated.”
“She is.” A big pause as we both watched the incoming vehicle. “She’s smart and fierce, and she loves her son dearly. And she’s happiest when she’s on a battlefront.”
That was a whole heap more intel than I’d expected to get—and not at all reassuring. I took a cue from my host and stayed in my chair, watching as the b-pod landed with a flourish on a small circle of shorn grass and the lights flickered out.
Moments later, a woman the size of a small mountain climbed out and called over to the patio. “Evening, Tameka. I hear you have company.”
“You heard right.” Tameka fished again in the bucket beside her chair and made no move to get up. “Can I offer you a cider?”
“Is this the local stuff, or your special supply?”
My host chuckled. “You’ll have to drink to find out.”
The woman had reached our little deck, and I decided that however informal Tameka might consider the visit, I didn’t want to meet this encounter lying down. I levered myself out of the lounging chair and held out a hand. “I’m Kish Drinkwater, Singer. Nice to meet you.”
“Evgenia Lovatt, first and only wife of the Inheritor, if the man knows what’s good for him.”
I suspected that if he didn’t, she’d make ship’s grease out of him. “I’ve heard he’s a smart man.”
She snorted and took the bottle of cider Tameka held out. “I was hoping you’d be smart enough to ignore his request and stay home.”
I hadn’t been aware he’d made one until I arrived, but I wasn’t about to say so. “Fixers go where we’re sent.”
“Just a cog in a wheel, are you?” She eyed me with an air of vague disdain. “I told Emelio we could make this happen without interference from some wisp of a girl who doesn’t know a scythe from a winnower.”